Assessing the multifaceted influence of parents on adolescent adjustment: Development and validation of a new parent-adolescent questionnaire battery

This program of research involves the development and validation a set of theoretically-linked and behaviourally-specific measures to assess multiple and interconnected facets of the parent-adolescent relationship, parenting and adolescent adjustment. The development of the scales is guided by the need for brief, freely available, and multi-dimensional scales that can be flexibly used across research, evaluation, clinical and community contexts.

So far, we have developed three measures:

the Adolescent Functioning Scale (AFS);

the Parent-Adolescent Functioning Scale; and

the Parenting of Adolescents Scale (PAS).

These measures are designed to be applicable across the pre-teen to emerging adult developmental period, and assess both positive and negative dimensions of adolescent functioning, the parent-adolescent relationship and parenting practices from the perspective of both parents and adolescents. Testing, validation and assessment of the change sensitivity of these scales is ongoing. The study is being conducted in collaboration with researchers from the University of Southern California.